rolled down a hill. And the least consideration convinces us, that the ten thousand Greeks, with their spears and their pæan, would have had no more chance than so many South-sea islanders, and not half so much chance as the Abyssinians of King Theodore, against a single European regiment armed with the breech-loader.
It is difficult at first to realise the differences in external things between the ancient Greeks and ourselves. It is difficult not to forget that Greek society was based on slavery, and that every house in Athens was more or less filled with captives from Asia Minor or Thrace, or elsewhere, whose vernacular language probably the master of the house did not understand. It does not occur to one to remember that such a simple instrument as the stirrup had never been introduced to assist the riders of ancient Greece. But an author like Xenophon going into homely details, and giving us unfaded photographs of daily incidents, fresh as they occurred twenty-two centuries ago, is of the utmost value in enabling us to see these things, and to "restore" in imagination the life of ancient Greece. No more graphic and stirring narrative than that in which Xenophon traces the fortune of the Ten Thousand was ever written. And his practical treatises on the Horse and on Hunting are excellent in themselves, and are full of interest from an antiquarian point of view.
Apart then from his style, Xenophon's chief merit and his chief service to modern readers consist in the amount of information he has preserved. The 'Ana-
